Author: Adam Frucci

You can learn a lot about the psyches of internet users through Google’s search suggestions, as we’ve seen. But What Do You Suggest? lets you explore these suggestions in a much more in-depth way.

The site allows you to start with any word you want, opening up visual trees showing what words people usually type next. The lines connecting the words show how common each word combo is, allowing you to follow the popularity to the most common search phrases or going to some of the weirder ones. And at the end, of course, you get the results those people searching for these things end up with.

It’s a fascinating little time-suck, if you’re interested in just how people use Google and how everyone is just a little bit crazy. [What Do You Suggest? via Infosthetics via Brian Stelter]

Who needs a lamp to be classy when it can be fucking horrifying? That’s what the “Half Life” lamp is, because it glows thanks to living hamster cells that have been enriched with firefly genes. Holy shit.

The lamp, created by Joris Laarman, was created without harming any hamsters, apparently. Instead, it was created using a culture of tissue kept alive since 1957. Oh, that’s much less creepy, thanks so much, Joris!

Want to see this horrifying specimen in person? It’ll be on display at the Friedman Benda Gallery in NYC starting tomorrow. [Metropolis via Inhabitat]

A company called Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory has created the “Hana Sukkiri Melody” ringtone, which claims to be able to clear out your sinuses whenever anybody calls you. Ah-whaaaa?

The company claims that “the ringtone will make a nose has resonant frequency with pollens adherent inside your nasal cavity, so eventually pollens fall down.” Oh, is that how things work? If so, why don’t people just play the tone over and over again into their nose to clear things up rather than relegate it to ringtone status, where they’re presumably expected to let the phone ring a few times while they hold it up to their nose before answering.

Luckily, JRTL has some much more sensible-sounding ringtones in the pipeline, including “sleep-promoting ringtone,” “ringtone makes your date,” “crow scarer ringtone,” “ringtone makes your skin beautiful,” and more. And I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting years for a ringtone to get these danged crows away from me. Finally! [Asiajin via Twitter]

There’s been all sorts of hype about Dean Kamen’s revolutionary prosthetic, robotic hand. But let me ask you a question, Dean: is your hand made of Legos? No? Well, thanks but no thanks, then. [NowhereElse via CrunchGear]

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to inject some tech or sci-fi elements into this year’s crop of Oscar movies. Man, I want to see all of these so badly. Tons of amazing entries this week.

First Place—Randy Crouton
Second Place—Scott Campagnolo
Third Place—Gustavo Maciel

Are you frustrated by game publishers releasing same-day DLC that screw used game purchasers over? How about making you pay for what should be essential, built-in parts of a game? Well, get ready for more of it, says Peter Moore.

Moore, president of EA Sports, is looking for how to squeeze an extra $5 out of every Madden player. You can already buy new uniforms, old stadiums and player attribute boosts for the current crop of Madden games. But what’s next? In this constant bleeding of the consumer, could they offer up new playbooks? Could they charge you for new teams? How much of this stuff was designed to be put into the game and then sliced out to be sold seperately?

To be sure, a lot of DLC is great. Additional missions in action games, made after the game was released as an extra chunk of gameplay for the hardcore, is wonderful. But when we’re seeing it being used more and more as a tool to screw over used-game buyers and to sell us what clearly should have been part of the original game, publishers are going too far. Where’s the line? [IGN via Kotaku]

Global Gaming Factory’s purchase of The Pirate Bay was surprising. But even more surprising is that they offered an even bigger sum to Mininova, one of the other huge public BitTorrent trackers.

Apparently, GGF and Mininova had a contract good to go, based on Mininova escaping their court case unscathed. That didn’t happen, and now Mininova filters its torrents for copyrighted material, essentially neutering it.

Of course, whether or not GGF actually had 20 million euros to throw at Mininova is debatable. GGF had a month to come up with the $7.8 million it agreed to pay The Pirate Bay after its shareholders approved the deal, and that deadline has passed with nothing happening.

According to TorrentFreak, GGF had big plans to buy up all the major trackers and turn them into legitimate music sites that was on the level with record labels. Exactly how they were going to do this is unclear. Sounds like the worst business plan ever! And with the Pirate Bay deal seeming dead in the water, you’ve got to wonder just who these GGF guys are and what the hell they were thinking. [TorrentFreak]

A new study shows that people emotionally bond with their Roombas, giving names and arbitrary genders to their robotic vacuum cleaners. And gee whiz, they can’t even sleep with these robots!

The study, done by Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, showed that 21 of 30 studied Roomba owners gave their bots names, while 16 referred to it as a “he.” People also like to help out the Roomba, pre-cleaning for it and even buying new rugs for it to clean up.

The fact that people are anthropomorphizing Roombas, robots that look absolutely nothing like a person, should bode well for the inevitable robots that are actually designed to look like people. On the other hand, it may be that the Roomba’s total other-ness is what makes people OK with becoming attached to them. They’re just cute little vacuum cleaners, not big, latex-covered biped robots trying to have a conversation with you. But someday! [MSNBC]

Bad news for weeknights! Scientists in Korea have figured out that when you oxygenate booze, it sobers you up faster and helps prevent hangovers the next day.

But it’s not all good news: by oxygenating booze, you’re putting, you know, oxygen in it. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a fizzy glass of Lagavulin.

Furthermore, while the O2-booze does reduce hangovers, it also cuts down on how long you’re drunk for. And hell, what’s the point of that? Sure, if you’re 19 and don’t know how to drink it’s good news, but the acquisition and retention of the perfect buzz is an artform. This would destroy it.

But really, this seems like it’ll be a pretty niche product. in Korea, a company called Sunyang Co is soon to sell oxygenated soju called O2 Lin. If you want soju that won’t give you a hangover and has bubbles in it, there it is. But if you want good-old normal hooch that’ll really punish you the next day if you go overboard? It isn’t going anywhere. [Report via io9]

It’s a common thing to see on TV: the cops get a dark, blurry image of a perp, and using the magic of computers, are able to zoom in and see his face. But now that might be actually possible.

The technique, called compressed sensing, won’t work like those fake programs do on TV. And it’s mostly meant for scientific purposes, like shortening MRI scan times by only scanning a small amount of data and then filling in the rest.

But how can you do all the number crunching that is required to find the sparsest image quickly? It would take way too long to analyze all the possible versions of the image. Candès and Tao, however, knew that the sparsest image is the one created with the fewest number of building blocks. And they knew they could use l1 minimization to find it and find it quickly.

To do that, the algorithm takes the incomplete image and starts trying to fill in the blank spaces with large blocks of color. If it sees a cluster of green pixels near one another, for instance, it might plunk down a big green rectangle that fills the space between them. If it sees a cluster of yellow pixels, it puts down a large yellow rectangle. In areas where different colors are interspersed, it puts down smaller and smaller rectangles or other shapes that fill the space between each color. It keeps doing that over and over. Eventually it ends up with an image made of the smallest possible combination of building blocks and whose 1 million pixels have all been filled in with colors.

That image isn’t absolutely guaranteed to be the sparsest one or the exact image you were trying to reconstruct, but Candès and Tao have shown mathematically that the chance of its being wrong is infinitesimally small. It might still take a few hours of laptop time, but waiting an extra hour for the computer is preferable to shutting down a toddler’s lungs for an extra minute.

So yeah, it’s meant for scientists right now, but this is clearly the first step to us all being about to enhance, enhance, enhance our pictures automagically. And that is damned cool.

[Wired]

Assassin’s Creed II is one of the best console games of 2009. And now, Ubisoft has released a top-down multiplayer version of it for the iPhone/iPod touch, free for two days.

The game, which is to the console version of ACII what the original Grand Theft Auto is to GTAIV, features a top-down viewpoint. The goal is to seek out fellow assassins who you’re playing over WiFi and…assassinate them. You sneak around by blending in with civilians.

Sound fun? Well, it’s free for now but bumps up to $2.99 after 48 hours, so get on it! [iTunes Link]

You’ve probably heard about the school district that installed spy software on laptops issued to its students so they could spy on them without their knowledge. Creepy! Well, here’s a peek at the principal who came up with the idea.

The other fellow in the video is DC Pierson, of Derrick Comedy fame. He has a new book out called The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To. It’s awesome and you should check it out. He also co-wrote and co-stars in the new movie Mystery Team, which he made with the Derrick Comedy folks. That is also very much worth checking out! So do it!

The Oscars are coming up in a couple of weeks. With the obvious exceptions of Avatar and District 9, there isn’t a lot of sci-fi or gear in the nominees. We can fix that, right guys?

So take the less sci-fi nominees and inject in a nice dose of tech, will you? Send your best entries to me at [email protected] with Oscar Movies in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs under 800k in size, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I’ll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

The XCM Cyberchrome case makes your PlayStation 3 look like the bumper of a ’57 Chevy, which is neat. Although I’ve gotta wonder if it makes the PS3 any less of a dust magnet.

We’ve already seen XCM’s chrome case for the Xbox 360, but it somehow looks a bit better suited for the PS3’s lines. Not that I’d spend $70 to gussy up my PS3, but still, it’s better than the 360’s. [Total Console via Technabob]

The shark-filled aquarium at the Dubai mall, full of 33,000 sea creatures and 2 million gallons of water, has sprung a leak through its 30-inch acrylic walls. This won’t end well! Updated: Now with video!

The leak had people wading out of the mall. A representative for Dubai’s civil defense force said they’ve got the situation under control and are fixing the problem, but I wouldn’t want to be the first one back down in that tunnel.

So how long do you think it’s going to be until they can’t afford to keep up all this ridiculous shit they’ve built and the entire thing turns into a post-apocalyptic wasteland with lawless bandits scavenging for all of the luxury items no one is around to pay for? Should be exciting! [NY Times]

Drunk Hulk puts it well:

Update: Now there’s video:

I’m pretty sure BSMT GARBAGECAN is not where this package was intended to be delivered. But hey, UPS delivered it, and that’s all that counts, I guess.

Martin says:

On Monday I couriered an envelop containing paper objects and a DVD from Toronto to New York, to be included in an exhibition that will open this afternoon. The envelop never arrived, and today I saw UPS’s “proof of delivery” – which I attached for you as a pdf document. They had successfully delivered my shipment to a “BSMT GARBAGECAN.”

The objects were meant to be included in an exhibition entitled “How To Do Things With Words and Other Materials,” and its seems UPS has contributed its own little performance piece. Also, they haven’t heard the last of me.

And on a related note, at least it wasn’t THIS:

[Thanks, Martin!]

Would you like to see Hot Tub Time Machine, days before normal rubes can see it in theaters? If you’re in NYC, you’re in luck! We’ve got a fistful of tickets to a screening for our lovely readers. UPDATED

The screening takes place next Tuesday the 2nd of March at 7:30pm. It’s at the Times Square Regal E Walk at 247 W42nd St. We have 44 seats to give away, so we’re offering 2 tickets each to the first 22 people who email [email protected] with “I like free movies and I also like Gizmodo!” in the headline. Include your name in the body of the email. We will email you back if you get in fast enough. When you get to the theater, you’ll be on the list with a +1 for a friend. Don’t email us if there’s a chance you can’t make it. That would be a pretty dick move.

Cool? Cool. Get e-mailin’!

That was fast! Thanks to those who entered, our list is all full-up. We’ll respond to those who emailed fast enough. If you don’t hear from us, you won’t be on the list, so don’t come to the theater as things will just be awkward.

Attention, classic JRPG fans! You can now grab both Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II from the iTunes App Store for $9 apiece, complete with touch-friendly controls and bonus dungeons.

The original Final Fantasy includes the five bonus dungeons, The Soul of Chaos pack and The Labyrinth of Time, added to later editions of the game. While Final Fantasy II contains the five bonus dungeons added with the Soul of Rebirth and Arcane Labyrinth pack.

[Kotaku]

These concept headphones feature a build-in camera, projector and wireless device so you can live-stream your life to the internet. But I’m more interested in the sheepskin on the cans. Comfy!

On the one hand, it’s cool to see a POV camera stuck onto something other than glasses. These actually look wearable! But I don’t know why the hell there’s a projector on there. I guess when you don’t have to worry about actually making a device, just a concept, it doesn’t hurt to throw the kitchen sink at it, no matter how impractical it may be. [Yanko Design]